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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteCommon Crawl lets you search and process archived web snapshots; it is not a service that sends a crawler to fetch a live site on demand. A practical workflow is to select a crawl release, choose WARC, WAT, or WET for the information you need, find records with the right index, and retrieve or analyze only those records.
What Common Crawl gives you
Common Crawl describes its corpus as petabytes of web data collected regularly since 2008. It includes raw page records, metadata extracts, and text extracts, and can be accessed in whole or in part or analyzed in Amazon’s cloud. Its releases are crawl snapshots, each with a versioned identifier; choose one that covers the period you care about rather than assuming the newest release will remain current. The official overview and Get Started guide describe the corpus and available releases.
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Availability in a snapshot is not guaranteed for every URL. Common Crawl’s documentation describes the archive and its access methods, but does not promise that a particular page appears in every crawl.
Choose the record format that matches your task
| Format | What it contains | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| WARC | Raw archive records, including HTTP responses, request records, and crawl metadata. A response includes HTTP headers and the response payload. | You need the fuller source record, headers, or response details. |
| WAT | Computed metadata for WARC records. For HTML responses, JSON can include response headers and extracted HTML information such as links. | You need metadata or link structure rather than the full raw response. |
| WET | Extracted plaintext and record metadata. | You need page text and do not need the raw HTML response. |
These formats preserve different information: extracted WET text is not a full substitute for WARC and does not retain the page’s layout. Common Crawl outlines the formats in its access guide.
#1 Best Overall
Find the relevant records with the right index
Use CDXJ for an individual URL or capture
The CDXJ index is designed to locate individual page captures. You can query it through the index server, and index files are also available in S3. This is the more direct starting point when you want to check for a particular URL in a selected crawl. See Common Crawl’s CDXJ Index documentation.
The CDX API is frequently abused and heavily rate limited. Avoid sending broad, repeated bulk searches to the interactive endpoint; Common Crawl recommends its URL Index through Athena or Spark for broad filtering. Its FAQ explains this limitation.
Use the columnar index for bulk filtering or analysis
The columnar URL Index is stored in Apache Parquet and supports analytical queries across many records. Common Crawl documents approaches using AWS Athena and also points to Spark and local tools such as DuckDB; the files can also be used with Pandas, Polars, and Apache Arrow. This is the better fit for filtering or aggregating many records rather than looking up one capture. Start with the official Columnar Index guide.
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Index schemas evolve. When comparing crawl partitions, check which fields exist and inspect null values: newer schema fields may be empty or null in older partitions. Common Crawl’s URL Index guidance discusses schema and query examples.
Retrieve or process only the data you need
- Select a crawl release. Use the release listings in the Get Started guide to choose a snapshot appropriate to your time period.
- Pick a record format and index. Choose WARC, WAT, or WET according to the fields you need, then use CDXJ for an individual capture or the columnar index for broad filtering.
- Inspect the index result. Use the returned record location to identify the relevant archive data before downloading or querying it.
- Retrieve or analyze the selected records. Common Crawl provides HTTPS paths under
https://data.commoncrawl.org/for downloads and S3 paths for cloud workflows. Its guide includes command-line examples and links to Hadoop, Spark, Python, and other examples.
HTTP(S) downloads do not require an AWS account. AWS S3 API access requires authentication. For AWS-based processing, Common Crawl says the bucket is in us-east-1 and recommends processing there to improve transfer speed and avoid minimal inter-region transfer fees. Consult the access guide for the relevant paths and examples.
Account for query cost and scale
Athena is a paid query service. Common Crawl’s Columnar Index guide reported that the index table for one monthly crawl contains about 300 GB and described about US$1.50 as an upper-bound scan-cost estimate as of September 2025. Most queries scan only part of the table and are usually cheaper, but this is a dated estimate, not a current price quote or a guaranteed bill. Query cost depends on scanned data, and AWS pricing and transfer charges can change. Check current AWS pricing and the estimated bytes scanned before running a query. See the Columnar Index guide.
Quick Recap
Best Value
A simple decision rule
- For one URL or capture, start with CDXJ.
- For broad filters, counts, or other multi-record analysis, use the Parquet columnar index with Athena, Spark, or a compatible local tool.
- For raw HTTP responses and headers, retrieve WARC; for extracted metadata or links, use WAT; for text-only analysis, use WET.
- To avoid unnecessary downloads, query the index first and retrieve only the records your task needs.
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